What can really be said about Celebrity Apprentice? It’s amazing reality television, preserving C-lister careers.
Dennis Rodman, who somehow survived to mid-season, was the center of one of the most falsely emotional moments in TV history. The Celebrity Apprentice: Intervention:
If music cues alone could do all the emotional work, this show would let them. What raw power. It’s interesting though, especially when Jesse James talks about celebrities’ social responsibility to live up to civilian expectations.
The problem with reality TV stems from its inability to be profound due to an overindulgence in emotive rhetorical techniques. When editing is used to create narrative from a number of out-of-context clips, the rhetoric has no structure. It relies on hitting the audience over the head with the message to make sure the clips can fit the desired storyline. It breaks. Then the show attempts to cover the holes with sappy music, falsely tense commercial break points and other “magic.” Smoke and mirrors.